The Thing That Hath Been

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Title:     The Thing That Hath Been
Author: Arthur Shearly Cripps [More Titles by Cripps]

What's the good of him?' said the bar-tender to me. 'If he could tell us how the Ruins came he might be worth a forty-pound cheque every month, or at least a twenty one. But he can't.'

We were discussing the new appointment of a Government Curator at the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not. I pleaded that he was a bit exacting, that the Curator had a very cold scent to puzzle out, and that he had tried plodding about from ruins to ruins, moling and sapping and mining, not to speak of writing to the Rhodesian Press. Afterwards I shouldered my knapsack, sought counsel with my carriers as to ways and means, crossed the river and took the Ruins road. A motor-car hurtled past me when I was within two miles. Its driver had been pointed out to me as a Jo'burg magnate; his passengers I did not know, but I was soon to know them. I was the first to reach the Ruins after all; for their arrival time being one o'clock, and their halting-place a hotel. Civilization demanded that they should lunch there.

I drank from the fair water by the temple's western approach, and sat down to smoke under a tree in the precincts. The big cone of the main tower was just in sight. I had seen the walls before, and was in no analytical mood; synthesis was enough for me. I took in with my delighted eyes a roofless dome worthy to be a temple of some sort, even if it were not, a blue roof that bettered mere human aspiration, debris testifying to earthly incompleteness, a broken column with its memento mori all these were simmering in my vision and my judgment. I half dozed until the voices of the lunchers began to interest me. They were doing the rounds rather hastily, lunch having cut into their time, so short at its very best.

A Church dignitary from our own territory was with them. He introduced himself to me, and he also introduced an engineer. He was a patriotic Rhodesian, that dignitary, and denounced McIver, who had dared to assign to the Ruins a native origin.

'Such nonsense!' he said. 'Believe me, my dear sir, I know the natives, and I know the natives never built these walls. Poor creatures; they want firm handling, don't they? They're always in want of bossing-up. But as for this display of art, they haven't it in them, and they never had.'

The engineer did not seem interested in what was said, or in what I answered. He was a man of few words. He went off to the eastern wall, whither we followed him. I found him poking about there with a stick. The Jo'burg charioteer was soon fussing along, hurrying on tea-time. 'He didn't want to get a dose of fever this trip,' he said. He had heard about our unhealthy season up north, and the month was now April. He wanted to be back by sunset. So it came to pass that his party went off to tea with but side-glances at the hill-fastness.

'I'm neither a baboon nor a nigger,' said their host, when I proposed that he should go up. After all, it was good-natured of him to motor the dignitary out, I considered. He himself affected no sort of interest in antiquities, and the dignified antiquarian under his care was so wearily keen. I went to tea with them, postponing my reveries to camping time and night. It was not until we were eating guavas at the end of our meal that the engineer came in. Then the Jo'burger told him to hurry up, and went off to cherish his car. As to the engineer, his scanty tea-time was not left in peace. The dignitary lectured him on the true and patriotic theory of Ophir, on Astarte's worship, and Solomon's gold. He answered very little, but he hinted that there were difficulties. His lecturer glowed, and appealed to the Curator, who had just come in, bent and shaken with fever. Unhappily, yet happily for me, he trod on one of the curator's archaeological corns and involved himself in an apology. Before he was out of the wood I had asked the engineer a question or two.

'No time to talk now,' he said, 'too much cackle. Come and see me in the town. Or, if I miss you there, I may see you on the road, mayn't I? I'm due out your way in three days.'

Soon after he was petroled away. I went to camp in a clearing, to sup, to smoke, to read my guidebook. At last the night aged, and the moon rose. My carriers slept. I looked up in the night's starred face and beheld 'Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance' there. But would I ever live to trace them by 'the magic hand of chance,' as Keats called the grace of God? I began again to mumble the lines of my guide-book, and found them rather bare and dry. I looked up at the vast tapering walls. Why was there no script there? After all, that trenchant argument outweighed a many arguments; it scaled up like Brennus's sword, and made for a clear issue. I looked at the sleeping carriers. Did they hold the secret, not in tradition, not in history, but in the fleshy tables of the heart and brain and aspiration of their race? I went to sleep and dreamed of men building, building, building. They were building stone kraals for their sacred trusts of kine, chipping and carving away at their totem hawks and their crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a sky-high tower, with stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them mortar. How they sang over their work, and how it grew! Talk of Troy's walls; if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of Art, or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music of them! I could hear all the parts in their melodies the checking and countering and refrains and responses of them. But, before I woke, the parts were merged in full chorus. With that unison music in my ears I rose and knelt and rose again hastily. Then I ran round to the eastern wall under the zig-zag patterns. I came only just in time to see the sunrise by so doing.

It was three days after that I caught up Spenser, the Government engineer.

'I have seen buildings in North Africa,' he told me. 'They weren't much like those at Mabgwe. In the north, if they built with stones they built with great slabs. But those granite flakes at Mabgwe were easy for a primitive people to manage a very primitive people. Very primitive, or why did they build on sand when, six inches deeper, they might have founded on bed-rock? They didn't understand arches, seemingly. They weren't very careful about bond in building, were they? Nor were they very careful to break joint outside, much less inside, so far as I can judge. And the script; where is it? And the graves; where are they? If they were Semites, why didn't they write? If they were Semites, why didn't they bury? . . . But it isn't as easy as it looks, the riddle. There are one or two jagged ends that conical tower, for instance.'

We camped that evening near a Mission. I admired the oblong iron-roofed church there. It wasn't my style of art, but it seemed to me fair of its kind.

'Quite good,' growled my expert friend, and he said no more at the time. He spoke more freely over a last pipe.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'not to take more interest in this sort of thing. Only, after all, it's African-built, and Europeans could do the thing a bit better, couldn't they? This sort of thing seems rather a wrong line of advance. If I hadn't seen Mabgwe so lately I mightn't mind so much.'

They showed us to a hut, a very clean one. 'That's better; that's ever so much better,' he said. On the wall was a rude frieze in Bushman painting style, but white, not red. I enlightened him as to tsenza work, as to how you could use the cool watery roots like crayons.

'Why, that's surely Jezebel looking out of that grain-bin,' he hazarded. 'But what are those?'

'The dogs to eat her,' I answered.

They were horrid little whelps with human heads. I told him about certain night-fears common among natives. 'It was a solid Christian who dared to paint these,' I surmised.

'If you could only get Africans to believe what Christians believed in the thirteenth century you might see signs and wonders yet,' he said.

He has not been our way again since April, but I met him at the Pro-Cathedral Pageant in January. It was organized by a Pageant Master, our mutual friend the dignitary. Therein Asia, King Solomon and Sheba's Queen, were represented. Africa was relegated to her proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. 'Poor creatures!' Spenser said, with a grimace, and winked at me.

'Come, and I will show you a thing,' he said to me afterwards; 'a thing I chanced on in the Christmas holidays. It's ten miles out. I want to inspan at six sharp to-morrow.'

I was guilty of three omissions next day. I cut a clerical meeting; I flouted the True Romance in the shape of the Pageant's second performance; I also missed the bazaar of St. Uriel's Native Church that was held on the Pageant ground. St. Uriel's structure had been put out to European contract; it was a very didactic building, so the Pageant-Master told us. We passed it on our way out to the kopje country.

'About as sensuously lovely as a Pills' advertisement,' was Spenser's comment. 'A good pity and terror purge.'

I sighed indulgently.

'It's very popular, I've heard, among the town boys. It's so very European to native eyes, so extra corrugated and angular.'

We came up at last to that which we sought a huge ellipse and dome of stones and earth, rising and broadening under our very eyes. It was on a farm among the granite hills, many miles from Rosebery. 'It's only a glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone Kaffir hut,' Spenser commented. 'It's not even built the old Mabgwe way. These are only blocks of granite; a few of them broken, but not one of them dressed. And there's lots of mud to eke them out.'

'Yet there's hope in the thing. It's not an artistic dead-end like Saint Uriel's,' I pleaded.

One or two Europeans, very unskilled ones I could see, had planned this bit of work, and taken part in it. They had made themselves at charges for it, though African gifts had not been wanting. They had, so to speak, coaxed their African pack on to try an old scent. Now the moving European spirit was gone home for months to England. Before he went the former rains had ruined some of the work. He had been too ambitious, too scornful of delay. Forewarned by Africans, he had pressed to a midsummer disaster. Now he had left Africans in charge. He had trusted them to go on. One Christian, in particular, he had trusted his fellow and his master in building. The boy had built at a colonial's cattle-kraal once. His skill had multiplied as he built on at the great church, and now he was a master craftsman. Doggedly he was building up again the rain-ruined bastions. The work was going with a swing, if a slow one. The scent was no longer a cold one. The pack were belling and chiming over it, and they were running with their huntsman out of sight.

'I don't understand this bit of work properly,' Spenser said. 'What's made the dry bones live?'

'Inspiration,' I said reverently. 'Looked at in one way it's Art. Looked at all ways it's Religion. It's the same sort of thing as went on, I suppose, when the faith of sun and moon was a power. Now the faith of Christ is gathering force in the land. The land isn't an Italy, and our twentieth century isn't that old thirteenth century; yet look out for the signs and wonders you spoke of. Likely enough they're to be expected.'

We went to the Pageant Master's lecture on the Mabgwe Ruins that night, when we had driven back to Rosebery. It was more interesting to me as a subjective study than an objective display of learning.

'Poor creatures!' the lecturer said of the natives. 'Don't put them in a false light. Whatever claims they may have to equable treatment, they have no claim to be considered romantic. The ancient romance of this country is the romance of a nobler race the romance of the Tyrian trader, Tyrian or Sabaean. Allow me but a trifling emendation, and Matthew Arnold's lines will serve to indicate that romance.' Substituting 'Zambesians' for 'Iberians,' he gave us the last lines of 'The Scholar Gipsy.' 'In that era of Tyre's trade,' he concluded, 'I place the golden age of our country a golden age which under our own Imperial rule begins anew.'

'H'm,' said Spenser. 'That live Mashona building-boy's worth many dead Phoenicians to me, at any rate. As to defining romance, we'd better agree to differ. 'Do well unto thyself, and all men will speak well of thee,' he went on, with a tang of bitterness. 'Jew-boys and Arabs mopped up trade when they were living, now they jump other men's kudos, being dead.'

'Never mind.' I said. 'Art for Art's sake, aspiration for aspiration's, faith for faith's! And some there be which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them.'

'Never mind,' it was his turn to say. 'That granite kopje church is rising, and Magbwe Ruins stand the quick and the dead. These shall both come up for judgment and get justice. Yes, if they have to wait for it till the Supreme Court of Alt holds session.'

[The end]
Arthur Shearly Cripps's short story: Thing That Hath Been

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